The present disclosure relates to application programming interfaces (APIs).
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are sets of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. APIs specify how software components should interact with each other, typically to achieve performance of some task. An API may be likened to a kind of coding contract that specifies, for instance, how a computer program should access a database, control a peripheral device, and so on. For example, if a programmer wishes to write a set of machine-readable instructions for a processor to enable the processor to read and analyse data from Twitter® then he may base the instructions on the Twitter API.
APIs can be made up of different elements depending on the components that are interacting, and the type of interaction. For example, APIs may include libraries that specify the variables, classes of objects, methods, routines, data structures, functions, command formats, and so on, that may be involved in the interactions between the components.